


Steep and thorny (a remix)

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Caning, Canon Relationships, Consent Issues, Corporal Punishment, Dubious Consent, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Ontological status of medial consonants, Remix, School, Speculation about Ralph's L, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 10:40:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4218582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A remix of havisham's <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1135243">The Primrose Path.</a></p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: sexual activity between characters aged 15 and 19 (canonical), all the homophobia you can shake a Victorian birch rod at, corporal punishment of minors, consent issues, abuse of power, period-typical language concerning mental illness and disability, Ralph Lanyon being his own exhaustive list of content notes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steep and thorny (a remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Primrose Path](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135243) by [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/pseuds/havisham). 



It had, Mr Pearl reflected, been a rather unfortunate concatenation of circumstances. Had Mrs Dean been supervising the fourpennies, she would have noticed the misbehaviour and ejected the offenders with a―well, _a flea in the ear_ was an unfortunate phrase concerning an establishment frequently slandered with the old repartee _go in with a blouse and come out with a jumper_ ―but, anyway, Mrs Dean would have made sure to put a stop to it while it could still be described, even by the most hygiene-minded, as normal boyish ragging. But Mrs Dean was laid up with sciatica, and her place taken by Miss Porteous, who was a nice girl, a very nice girl, not in her own way inefficient, sweet-natured and a perfect smasher in the burgundy uniform with gold trim, but a one-and-sixpennies usherette to her pink-polished fingertips. It had taken the complaint of another patron to draw her attention to the matter, and then hadn’t she gone and shone her torch right on them, just as the sleek red-haired one had―Mr Pearl put his head in his hands and sighed, hoping that enough of the auditorium had been sufficiently transfixed by Barbara Stanwyck talking her way out of trouble to preserve what was left of the Crompton’s good name. Their accuser was a lean, shabby fellow with razor-burn and an unexpectedly educated accent. It had taken some time to convince him that discipline in such a case was better administered by the boys’ parents than by the police. Except two of them didn’t have parents―well, they did, but Fernhurst, and more precisely, P. Claremont and M. Jepson Esqs, housemasters, stood _in loco_. Loco was right, thought Mr Pearl transatlantically. Fernhurst. He might have known. Mr Pearl had no gust for his next task, but something about the raw, spotty neck rising from a grey, twice-turned collar had convinced him that the complainant was the sort to follow through, and the la-di-dah voice meant he might well know some of the schoolmasters up there. He should have to write. The Crompton’s fragile reputation depended on it. The life of the manager of an independent cinema could be a ticklish one, and no mistake.

* 

To a casual observer, Hazell’s punishment would have appeared indistinguishable from his fellow malefactor’s: a serious talk from his housemaster before being turned over to the Head of House to be beaten. To one a little more informed, as were most of the other junior boys, the situation had more nuance, but was still at bottom equitable: Jeepers would jaw for longer and more drearily than Clarey, but while the prefects had right arms of similar puissance if very different dimensions, Lanyon only whacked with a carpet slipper, where the Head of Claremont’s affected a wicked implement of stitched leather inherited from his father, the rector of Carrickfergus. 

In texture and mood, however, the execution of the identical sentences could hardly have been more different. Mr Claremont flung the cinema manager’s letter on the study fire after a cursory and disgusted glance; ruthlessly but without animus, he tore the rind off Collins mi. for drinking and bounds-breaking, adding, before sending him down the passage to Dodd’s impersonal Ulster vehemence, ‘You meet a filthy class of swine in the fourpennies, Collins. If you can’t run to ninepence, give the flicks a miss, understand me?’ The varieties of development are endless, and it so happened Collins mi. understood him perfectly. Though it would be an untruth to say he grew up the father of strong sons, he did prove a devoted uncle, who always tipped his nephews and nieces the price of the best seats in the house. 

Mr Jepson, meanwhile, luxuriated in private deprecation of Mr Pearl’s laborious euphemism, and carried the opulence of his censure into his interview with Hazell. The boy was pretty, he supposed, if one liked the nancyish type; he had the soft jawline and full pink lips of a starlet. But imbecilic: was there anything going on at all behind those vacant grey-green eyes? He was struck suddenly by misgiving: it suddenly seemed most improbable that this weak creature was the chosen instrument by which Vainglory should be brought low. A peremptory rap sounded at the door. Well, at the very least it would humble him a little, to come when he was called and do as he was bid. There must be no doubt about who was in charge of the house that had yet―owing to the innate conservatism of boys, and nothing more―to undergo a full transfer of nomenclature. 

‘Come in!’ 

Lanyon stood at the door. That inscrutable expression was not gentleman-like; it was that of a footman accused of stealing spoons. Of course, Lanyon’s people were a bit hairy in the heel; it wouldn’t matter if the boy weren’t so proud. 

‘Ah, there’s my man. Lanyon’ll set you straight. Give him six, if you please.’ 

Lanyon’s lip curled and he raised an eyebrow. The child burst into tears. 

* 

Claremont’s fêted a waddling Collins mi. with Welsh rarebit, sausages and buns; his brother cuffed the back of his head and said gruffly that he was a b.f., and significantly, that he hoped _Baby-face_ was worth it. 

‘Barbara Whatsit was. She’s super. Not―’ 

‘Good kid. That’s what I’d hoped you’d say.’ 

Stuart’s excoriated a waterish Hazell. It was a disgrace that he had not been booted. He got away with murder. Having him in the House was murder. They should form a deputation― 

‘Not likely anyone’d hand _him_ his marching orders,’ Harris remarked. 

‘Why?’ asked Odell. 

‘Because, me dharlin buoy, macushla machree,’ (Odell blushed for the affectations of last half), ‘if it weren’t for his father’s donation to the baths fund, you’d still be doin yer belly-floppers and yer breast-strokings in the old mill-pond beyant, so you would.’ 

* 

‘So both sides have to be―the same?’ Hazell raised Ralph’s pencil from the copybook. For a horrible moment Ralph thought the little beast was going to start sucking the end of it, but he laid it pensively against his cheek instead. 

‘That’s what “is equal to” is commonly understood to mean, I believe.’ 

‘Not always. I mean, two chaps could be about equal at―swimming, say―’ 

Ralph started slightly. He wondered if Hazell’s gaze had followed his own to Odell’s unhandy rugger passes on the field below. 

‘―but they wouldn’t have the same technique―’ 

Ralph tilted his head and waited. 

‘―oh. I see. Different ways of being the same number. It is a bit like, isn’t it?’ 

‘A bit. As true as an analogy has to be. May I ask, incidentally―what in heaven’s name did you _think_ it meant?’ 

Hazell tapped the pencil against his smooth, fine-grained face―though Hazell’s colouring was a shade darker and sallower, as unravaged by puberty as Odell’s, but Hazell was younger, his voice not yet settled; he might erupt into pustules next week. It would be no bad thing if he did. 

‘I think―’ Hazell said slowly, ‘sort of― _leads to_?’ 

‘What?’ 

‘You know how people say two and two _makes_ four? So I thought it was sort of a recipe, or something. A process.’ 

Ralph snorted a laugh. ‘You really aren’t as stupid as you seem.’ 

Somewhere a bell rang. Hazell closed the copybook and placed the pencil carefully in the groove on the desk. ‘Thank you, Lanyon. I understand it all a lot better now. When we began, I never thought it could, well― _lead to_ anything―’ 

Ralph had only to step back, leaving him room to get up and go, say something crisply encouraging about progress in algebra being rapid if the basics were grasped soundly. 

He didn’t step back. 

* 

You wouldn’t have to have read many psychological case studies to work out _why_ , Ralph thought: why here, in the prop room, why this evening. Coaching Odell, he’d had all the symptoms―they came to him in Latin rather than the Aeolian Greek he’d once attempted and found well beyond the capacity of a specialist on the science side:  


> lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus  
>  flamma demanat, sonitu suopte  
>  tintinant aures...

  
But there had been something gloriously innocent in it too, as he demonstrated how to make blocked manoeuvres appear spontaneous, how the showy grace of a exhibition bout looks as it becomes a fight in unselfconscious earnest. Odell’s shy grins contained no hint of policy; they expressed pure pleasure in learning a new skill, in improving physical co-ordination, in the exhilarating joy of using a healthy, agile boy’s body to its capacity. How could he even think of corrupting that? It was scarcely possible, anyway. Odell would simply recoil, bolt, into cleanness leaping. Better stick with what he was sure of.

If Hazell hadn’t been there, standing in for a member of the School Cert. form who was down with whatever plague Hugh had, Ralph would have gone to the bogs and tossed off. But Hazell was there, in the back row, absurd in Ophelia’s white nightie and a garland of paper flowers. Viciously typical of the Cert. mob to make him wear it. Ralph leaned over. 

‘What are you doing here? Aren’t your bits finished?’ 

‘They want me to hang about so Odell can jump on me again,’ he pouted, more disconsolate than provocative. Ralph wasn’t rising to _that_ , anyway. 

‘Come to the prop room when you’ve finished. There’s a stack of colour gels in there in a fearful state, but some of them might be usable still. You can help me sort them out.’ 

Against moth-eaten velvet, his chin pressed to his shoulder, his mouth open in a picturesque cry, Hazell looked like a boy Bacchus painted by a minor 17th-century Italian; his body likewise a baroque conglomeration of tight-knit sinew and plump curves. Ralph hitched up the gown and rubbed Hazell’s prick a couple of times through the light jersey of his underpants, abstractedly noting that the fine stuff withstood the school laundry better than cheap, before pulling them down at the back, trapping Hazell’s cock just under the waistband. He gave that gratifying little squeal again and hooked his leg around Ralph’s thigh, frigging himself against his hip. Hazell’s arse was an acknowledged marvel, its own justification for the queer mixture of hard and soft in his physique, and Ralph’s hands were full of it, kneading and squeezing, parting the cheeks. He was about to hazard a thumb drawn―not roughly, but none too gently―between them, leading to a circling, meaningful pressure on the boy’s arsehole, but just then Hazell’s encircling leg twitched and jerked, the flesh under Ralph’s left hand tensed, an oddly deep, mature grunt struggled through gritted teeth. 

Feeling his usual surge of foolish compassion, Ralph stroked Hazell’s hair and cradled his jaw, murmuring inarticulately. 

‘What―what shall I call you, Lanyon?’ Hazell gulped. 

‘Damn. I’m so sorry, my dear.’ He released him. ‘I thought you knew, though how the hell should you? Ralph.’ 

Hazell gave him an appraising look, comical in combination with a couple of yards of muslin rucked around his waist and stained smalls all askew. 

‘Suits you. The one is Murder, Ralph the other’s name.’ 

He wriggled to adjust his clothes and darted for Ralph’s balls as if they were both ten years old. Ralph dodged easily, caught him in his arms and kissed him with a savagery proportional to his embarrassment at not recognising the quotation. 

He was alone in his study before he realised he had failed to make a reciprocal inquiry. 

* 

‘What,’ the syllable cracked across the form-room like a rifle shot, ‘in God’s name is going on here?’ 

Someone sniggered. Lanyon looked around. 

‘Would one of you care to explain that mannerless―ejaculation?’ 

The room quivered with collective suppression. A very small boy called West, who practically alone of the junior school had worked out that it did no actual harm to stand up to Lanyon once in a while, ventured, ‘It was―you said “God’s name,” please, Lanyon. And it was about―religion, in a sort of way.’ 

‘Thank you, West. It must be delightful to be so easily amused. And what point of theology has Remove B so exercised as to overturn―give me that _Kennedy_ ―’ Lanyon glanced coolly at the coverless primer―‘Exley’s desk?’ 

Silence obtained. 

‘West, since you appear to be the only vertebrate in the form―hang on, what are those red―are those _beads_?’ 

Lanyon stepped forward. The front rank of the crowd parted with the choreography of instinct, revealing Hazell, as it were the sole survivor of Pharoah’s cavalry, on his knees collecting the minute globules. 

Lanyon’s face, asymmetrical (though not unattractively so) even in repose, stretched and sharpened over the wonky structure beneath. He looked half at, and half through Hazell, as if he were a dog that had started noisily licking its bollocks in the drawing-room. Hazell looked up and said with dignity, ‘It’s my rosary. Exley took it from my desk and I tried to get it back. And it broke.’ 

Lanyon looked to Exley, a burly, sullen boy, for confirmation; he nodded. About the scratches raked across his face Lanyon did not enquire. 

‘And Hazell, in a fit of―petulance, pushed over your desk. I see. Ragging on a fellow’s religion is lower than I’d expect even a baboon like you to sink, Exley. On your feet, Hazell.’ 

Lanyon’s imperturbable calm was like a weight, supported by braced posture and tense muscles. 

‘Clear up this mess. Hazell, my study after tea. Exley, I’ll let Dodd know about this display.’ 

He turned neatly on the ball of his foot and strode out, leaving Remove B to speculate, in astonished huddles, upon what had prompted the school’s most notorious heathen―they had a handful of official excused-chapel free-thinkers, but that was not the same thing at all as Lanyon’s magnificent, pagan indifference―to all but defend Hazell’s papist dabblings. West’s contribution, (which happened to be as close to complete accuracy as any one person’s speculation about another can be) namely, that mere unbelievers tend to have an affection for outward shows of faith not shared by those who feel the need to claim the title of atheist, was universally derided on the grounds of its proponent’s Judaism. But the general conclusion reached also had the merit of being true. 

* 

‘Oh, _Fidei Defensor_. Shut it behind you. You’re lucky Exley’s in Claremont’s, otherwise I should have to thrash you for fairness' sake.’ 

‘He ought to be beaten. It’s not fair.’ 

‘Agreed. Life isn’t. But he won’t be. I doubt I could greet you with any more warmth than Dodd is at present showing Exley if I tried. Do come and sit on my knee.’ 

Hazell swatted him playfully as he settled himself. ‘They’re not―not _so_ , silly.’ 

Ralph gave him a straight look, but saw that the ignorance was genuine and shook his head. ‘Never mind. I haven’t time for a sectarian history of the British Isles just now. Not if we’re to―look here, darling. The School Cert. play’s on Saturday. I’ve no cause to be hanging about the theatre after that, do you see?’ 

Hazell clung to him. ‘Ralph, please don’t,’ he said simply, his eyes wide and liquid. ‘I shall go mad in this place without you beside me. You can’t.’ 

Ralph volunteered his services as lighting engineer for the summer play, some bloody symbolical claptrap about butterflies and dung-beetles by a pair of Czechs. Hazell played the Parasite, to unexpected acclaim. 

* 

Hazell lolled against the doorjamb, his left hand thrust deep in his pocket. He had undergone one of those prodigies of masculine adolescent growth, putting on an inch in both height and breadth of shoulder in six weeks. It had left him clumsy and jaundiced-looking, though as yet he had been spared pimples. 

‘Hello, old chap,’ he said, brittle and rather loud. ‘I’m here to get what’s coming to me.’ 

Ralph forced amiability. ‘Which is sod-all, Hazell. We’ve been through this. Mr Williams said you were thirteenth in form order at half-term, and you’ll have your step to the Fifth in the autumn, barring some almighty cock-up in your exams. You don’t need me any longer. Now do get lost, I’ve these lists to write before the supper-bell goes.’ 

Hazell’s face crumpled bitterly. ‘You’re a cold fish, Lanyon. But as it happens, you’re wrong.’ He withdrew his hand from his pocket and held out a mauve chit. 

‘What the―’ Ralph leapt up and snatched it from him. It read, as they always did, _Indiscipline_. ‘Shut it behind you.’ 

‘That’s more like it. That’s what you used to say.’ He strolled across the study and made to dispose himself in the armchair. 

‘Who in hell told you to sit down?’ 

‘My. Aren’t we masterful?’ But he contented himself with a lazy hand on the wing, and leaned there, swaying. 

‘I can’t slipper you, Hazell―you’re―you’re―’ 

‘Not too old to be laid across your knee, sweetie. I haven’t my step yet. You said the next time I came up to you for a beating, a beating I should have. And here I am.’ 

Ralph collected himself. His mind tended in moments of stress to precise awareness of space and clarity of visualisation. It was a propensity that would, when the danger was physical, more than once save his life; when the peril was less tangible it produced ludicrous concretions of commonplace metaphor. He saw now a coil of new rope, to hang by the long drop a subject five foot nine and a half, weight ten stone two. _Good cable, to enforce and draw._

‘Take off your coat. _Only_ your coat.’ He handed him the current number of the _Geological Magazine_. ‘Shove that into the small of your back. I don’t propose to miss, but I don’t want to damage your insides if I do. Then get yourself over that chair.’ 

He went to the cupboard and took from its top shelf a Victorian birch rod, darkened with age, the sentimental gift of the friend of his father’s who had recommended Ralph to the projectors of an expedition to the Parry Islands and over the course of a couple of afternoons offered a corrective lesson in the risks of specialisation, not all of it directly relevant to Arctic research. 

Ralph had administered four lightish but accurate cuts before he heard, as he knew he would, that curiously virile groan. Vigour drained from his arm, leaving it a brittle reed that would crack rather than bend or flex. He stood staring at thin flannel pulled taut across splendid buttocks. He shuddered and dropped the cane; the small clatter roused Hazell minutely. He raised and shook, but did not turn his head, and said, ‘Fuck me, Ralph. Fuck me like this. God knows you want to.’

‘You mean you want me to. You want to be let off everything, like a sick child. Well, I’m not doing that for you any more. Can you stand?’ 

He extended a hand. Hazell made to accept, then slipped his own past it to Ralph’s crotch, and felt what was, and was not, there. Holding his arms stiffly away from his sides, Ralph let him. 

‘We’re perhaps more alike than you guessed. Now go, please.’ 

Hazell clambered wincing to his feet. ‘I guessed. And you’re right. You let yourself off too. You used me to let yourself off. Because you didn’t have the nerve to chance a k.b. from a boy you weren’t allowed to thrash.’ 

Ralph’s tongue dried and swelled to fill his mouth, fiery rivulets coursed over his scalp and down under the skin of his neck, back and limbs, he heard his own heartbeat in his ears and a deep crimson filter descended on his vision. 

Hazell gave a short, stifled yelp, and fled. 

* 

_I should never have doubted,_ wrote Matthew Jepson in his diary, _that the all-comprehending Providence which numbers every fallen sparrow and hair of our heads should find means to turn the most brittle of human clay to Its will, to chasten pride that is the source and original of all other sin._ He made his symbol for a highly satisfactory and memorable day, and closed the book. 

* 

Hazell’s remaining days at Fernhurst were not ones he cared to remember. A surprising number of people still wished to speak to him (including Somers, the Captain of the First XV, which ensured his physical safety) but all they wanted to talk about was Lanyon. He was bored of Lanyon. Lanyon, with his enthusiasms for electronic circuitry, Icelandic sagas and limestone formations, his Test matches and fencing tournaments retailed at a length approximating that of the interminable divertissements themselves, his bloody bloody bloody _boats_ , was not really a very interesting person. 

Hazell’s father was inclined to regard the episode as a coincidence of a dissolute individual with a demoralised House in a school and structure basically sound, and prepared to search for another, purer institution to accommodate his son. His mother saw the matter in quite another light; blaming the system foremost, she adamantly refused to countenance sending him away again, whereupon Mr Hazell expressed his conviction that unspeakables of that sort were overrepresented among the population of private tutors, and a perfect impasse was reached. 

Everyone was glad when into the deadlock came Mrs Hazell’s youngest sister, Imelda, just nine years her nephew’s senior and apt to make a great game of aunthood. She took him out to the theatre and the cinema, to lunch and tea, and mostly they talked of anything but his ill-starred school career. It was she, however, who after receiving a few of his confidences with uncondescending sympathy, asked a question wholly devastating in impact. 

‘And how do you feel about it all?’ 

He opened his mouth to tell her and found himself overwhelmed and speechless. He had often been told he was both self-centred and selfish, a spoilt only child, and so he assumed himself to be. And yet it had never occurred to him to enquire into his own feelings, no more than it had to anyone else. No one, not Jeepers nor the Head nor any of the masters, nor his parents, had ever shown a scintilla of interest in his emotional welfare. They were all concerned with what was best for him, of course, though even that took third place to the greater considerations of cleansing contagion and suppressing scandal. For a moment he found himself back in Jeepers’ study: the relentless questions, the fog of confusion, the desperate need to get out at any cost. After an hour of it he would have said anything to escape― _had_ said. He should never have to wonder, anyway, why in the old days people used to confess to witchcraft, why dozens wrote to the police when there had been a sensational murder. You didn’t have to be a loony, he wasn’t a loony. Jeepers, though―he remembered the twitching sandy moustache, the wet lips beneath, the shorthand annotation of every word he said. No, Jeepers wasn't a loony either. He thought he had known what the housemaster wanted with that voluminous record, what he did with it, but he had been wrong, and so was everyone who drew the same trite conclusion. Jeepers was not driven by lust, least and lightest of the cardinal sins, but pride, their root and cause. He could not abide Lanyon’s ultimate authority over the House, and would have him down. And Hazell had been the cat's paw. To have been the Head of House's tart was cleanness itself compared to having been the tool with which a man in middle life accomplished pitiful, envious vengeance upon a schoolboy. _Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt―_

Hazell sat gaping over sandwiches and walnut cake, his aunt signalling frantic solicitude across the table of a Gloucestershire farmhouse tea-room, mute salt water pouring uncontrollably down his face. He had been used, and not all the water in the rough rude sea could wash the knowledge away. He still meant to put that sea between himself and England as soon as he was able, but the knowledge he would bring with him, and nothing beneath even a bright Californian sun could could purchase him freedom from it.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from _Hamlet_ , I, iii.
> 
>  _lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus/flamma demanat, sonitu suopte/tintinant aures..._ is from Catullus' translation of Sappho, fragment 31. 'Tongue thickens, thin fire runs under limbs, ears ring with their own sound.'
> 
> 'The one is Murder...': Hazell plays on _Titus Andronicus_ V, ii.
> 
> 'bloody symbolical claptrap': _The Insect Play_ , by Josef and Karel Čapek. The role taken by the author of this fic in a school production of same may be tolerably obvious.
> 
> 'Good cable, to enforce and draw': George Herbert, 'The Collar.'
> 
> 'O that this too too solid flesh...' _Hamlet_ , I, ii.


End file.
